Whether or not Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “No President” will make the list of “Nutcrackers” on offer in NYC this holiday season remains to be seen. The score of “No President” is the much-beloved and seasonally appropriate “Nutcracker Suite” by Tchaikovsky, which is heard in hundreds of theatres across America every December, as “The Nutcracker” ballet has been a staple of American Christmas – and of American ballet companies’ operating budgets – since the 1960s, thanks to boosts from Disney, Balanchine, and broadcast TV.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s ongoing citational naming practice situates their work in specific relation to other artists and artworks. The company itself shares its name with the theatre company in Franz Kafka’s Amerika. “No President” makes use of Tchaikovsky’s full score, but not its title. Instead, “No President” is an homage to Jack Smith’s 1968 film of the same name.

Smith’s “No President” was made in response to and during the 1968 presidential election, in which former vice president Richard Nixon defeated incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey. Smith’s film includes footage from the 1940 presidential campaign of Wendell Wilkie, who lost to FDR. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s “No President” was first conceived and developed during Trump’s first presidency, and perhaps it will become a staple of election year programming – in the way “The Nutcracker” has become a holiday necessity – or even annual programming, as its title is perpetually relevant. What is the president but the landlord of America?

In Jack Smith’s ethos, “landlordism” is “the one problem… that’s crushing life everywhere in the world” (Smith, in conversation with Peter Kubelka, 1973). Stefan Brecht elaborates on this philosophy in relation to Smith’s work, in Queer Theater (1978):

[Jack] doesn’t understand it, the fact that you have to keep paying: you are paying for time itself, for your very life. Landlordism in his view is the origin of all the current crimes and troubles. (17-18)

Smith’s film “Hamlet in the Rented World” began with his idea for a version of “Hamlet” onstage, but shorter and better. (“He feels the play is very badly written, no structure… but can be salvaged by much cutting. Only the good lines are to be retained.”) In Smith’s conception, the whole family “will be landlords – modern royalty” (Brecht 18-19). According to Brecht’s account of this creative process, Smith was evicted from his loft while working on “Hamlet,” which he continued nonetheless to assemble from his new home and performance/studio space. 

In Nature Theater’s “No President,” the citational premise of the stage itself is front and center. The lush red velvet curtain at the heart of the action is framed within the larger theatre’s own gilded proscenium and gold drapes, in a glamorous Brechtian meta-theatrical staging that positions the structural proscenium to stand as quotation marks around the scenic proscenium. The action in front of that second curtain occurs in some liminal space between the stage, and the stage, and the seats – emphasizing and amplifying the echoes already in place like a funhouse mirror. The fourth wall is displaced, invoked, electrified, and meanwhile, whatever is happening upstage of that “enigmatic” and ostentatious Chekhovian gun of a curtain is inaccessible from the vantage point of the audience and the performers onstage. Or, rather than Chekhov’s gun, the curtain invites the question of Hamlet’s knife.

Traditionally, the velvety spectacle of the mainstage curtain and the proscenium hide an iron curtain – the origin of the phrase made popular by Churchill in the Cold War – hanging above the proscenium opening, a more prosaic fourth wall, ready to quickly descend and separate stage and audience in case of emergency. What does the velvet curtain protect us from, arrayed in velvet seats and attentive? In “No President,” the curtain itself is under close protection, protecting the art and the audience from one another. Do you have the knife? Smith regularly involved audience members in his live shows. Think of this as you make your entrance into the theatre itself – descend that disproportionately grand stone staircase from street level to the Skirball lobby like Smith’s starlet and superstar Mario Montez. Give it all the glamor and frivolity you can muster. Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s doubled invocation of these familiar tools, the stage within a stage, the play before the play, brings the theatre itself into vibrant, visceral focus, and all of us too. 

J de Leon is Associate Director of Engagement at NYU Skirball.